Shame Storm - <AUTHOR> https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/01/shame-storm <comment><USER3> As I've mentioned before, one of the interesting things I like to study in a casual way is the effect of social community structures on behavior. At this point it is not terribly controversial that modern social media systems encourage shame storms, via things like easy "viral" sharing, the existence of moderation systems that can be used to nuke any attempt to defend oneself out of existence, and the way modern social media encourages cheap virtue signalling by its nature (if nothing else, because there isn't really a way to demonstrate an expensive commitment to anything, everything is cheap words).

So, as an interesting constructive exercise rather than just bemoaning the situation, how could a social system be _engineered_ in a way that it might address the staggering ease with which this sort of shame storm arises, feeds itself, and flings itself against individuals? You can either start from an existing system and try to tame it, or start from scratch.

It's worth thinking about both because it's fun, and because the people who may actually someday fix it may well be here.

<comment><USER4> It's weird to me that almost all posting/commenting platforms are about the same. You get a series of small boxes with text in them and a small box to type into, usually too small to fit more than a couple of sentences, perhaps a button to promote, a button to reshare, and that's it. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, Disqus... all the same.

We've explored so little of the design space.

If I had to hazard in extrapolating from only a few data points, it seems that shame-storming behaviour correlates with (a) how easily you can reshare without thinking and (b) how easily you can reshare without context.

It would be fun to brainstorm all the possibilities for how we could be communicating online differently. Here are a few stupid ideas I've thought of; I'm sure there are millions more and I'd love to hear yours:

* You have to wait at least 30 seconds before you can hit the reply or reshare button.

* Short or low-information comments are discouraged; if your comment is short or an exact duplicate of something previously written (e.g. a common insult), it's blocked or you have to wait longer before posting it.

* You must listen to your comment read back to you aloud before you can post it.

* Even when reshared, your comment is always presented together with, and close to, the content of the original source article so it's hard to ignore the source.

* You have to correctly answer a simple question about the article before posting a comment on it. A Norwegian newspaper tried this ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14883842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14883842)).

* After you've gone back and forth a couple of times with the same person, the only option presented to you is to make a voice call directly to that person. You can't just type text at them any more.

* Variant: after a thread gets long enough, you can't type text any more. You must record yourself speaking.

* Every comment must be approved by its parent. (If you never approve replies, then your threads aren't interesting to read, and maybe you get a reputation for never approving, so no one will bother to reply to you.)

<comment><USER5> > We've explored so little of the design space.

The design space that we are willing to explore is limited by the fundamental evolutionary drive of social media platforms to hold your attention as long as possible by feeding you little hits of dopamine for minimal effort. Social media platforms thrive on size and activity and neither can be established by raising the bar, only by lowering it to new depths.

<comment><USER4> I think (at least a few) people are starting to realize that this is what's happening. There may be a window of opportunity opening up to try new and different things. I suspect there are a fair number of folks who are looking for alternatives to Facebook/Twitter/etc. and would be intrigued by novelty.

Bumble is an example of a platform that was all about changing the rules of engagement, and it seems to be doing all right so far. Perhaps there's hope?

<comment><USER6> It's doing alright as in not failing, but remains to be seen if any of their paradigms measurably improve anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Public shaming can either become less common or more common over time. If it becomes more common, it might eventually become less damaging. Right now, because only 1000s of people have been targets, it's feasible for employers to search online and not hire people who've been shamed.

A historic parallel of diminishing effect is posting identifiable pictures on the Internet. It used to be a big no-no, because when only a few people did it, you really did put yourself at additional risk from stalkers. But now enough people have personal information posted that you're just one in a large crowd.

When Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, people thought they'd be celebrated for 15 minutes. But perhaps it'll be the opposite: everyone will be publicly shamed for 15 minutes.

<comment><USER8> > If it becomes more common, it might eventually become less damaging.

I mean that's like saying if a huge percentage of Americans have been arrested then it might eventually become less damaging; that happened, and it _has_ become less damaging, but at the end of the day it's still extremely damaging.

<comment><USER9> > _I mean that 's like saying if a huge percentage of Americans have been > arrested..._

No, it's not like saying that. It's saying that public shaming might eventually become less damaging. If you want an analogy that expressed the point of the commenter, one was provided:

> _A historic parallel of diminishing effect is posting identifiable pictures > on the Internet._

This, also, is not like being arrested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Really interesting read-- this reminds me a ton of the New Criterion, which is constantly publishing articles of a similar style [1]. It's composed in this verbose, sometimes satirical New Yorker-style of writing, and offers such a stark contrast to what's normally cited as a "politically right" source, like Fox News, which I find pretty abhorrent in quality.

Thanks for linking to this; it's immensely important to learn >1 side to an issue, but with the quantity of shallow writing out there, it can often be a challenge.

[1] [https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/12/offense- archaeol...](https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/12/offense-archaeology)

<comment><USER11> Fascinated with the concept, I subscribed to the New Criterion a year ago. I'm not right-wing by any measurement, and I didn't even know the mag was oriented that way, but the idea of a magazine with no ads, no glossy pictures, no 6th- grade reading level? Based around art and commentary? I had to try it.

I like it a lot. It challenges me to be a more intelligent art consumer. It's not pumping stuff. It just wants to challenge me. I'm glad I tried it.

<comment><USER12> It's a monthly review of books, art, classical music performance, the theatre, and the state of the world from the point of view of a classical liberal. There's a refreshing lack of snark and partisan talking points. When I renewed, I gave a subscription to the local library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The rule for how to deal with this sort of "shaming" is quite simple: no matter what you may have been 'accused' of, _always_ double down and _never_ issue anything that might even loosely resemble an apology or an admission of weakness, no matter what the costs might be. Then simply wait until the mob gets bored and moves on to the next easy target. There are very high profile examples of this working quite well, but mentioning them here would cause undue controversy, so it is best to abstain.

<comment><USER14> It's hard to make heads or tails of this without a better definition of what constitutes "doubling down" or "working quite well".

The example that comes to mind is James Damore and he "doubled down" in the sense that he stood by his original statements (which made sense because his original memo was clearly and explicitly not endorsing the things he was accused of endorsing). It "worked out quite well" in that he _only_ lost his job and endured a lot of harassment, abuse, and slander (although who knows what kinds of psychological scars this treatment could have left him with), but probably didn't have a hard time finding another job and the mob did eventually (mostly) move on.

So either the Damore example satisfies your definition of "working quite well" but not mine (or probably most people) or this example illustrates that your prescription doesn't always work. Perhaps it is exceptional, in that most mobs aren't marshalled by major publications nor do they conspire with the CEO of one of the most prominent companies in the world.

<comment><USER13> Do you think that James Damore would have been _better off_ had he apologized and groveled to the mob of shamers? Even after he lost his job? (which there was no chance of avoiding - as you say, he went against the CEO of "one of the most prominent companies in the world".) That seems rather implausible if you know how these mobs generally behave. Forbearance - of the sort you might expect from an individual who has been wronged and sought appropriate restitution - never happens, because it's not a stable equilibrium. What happens is that the "storm" eventually blows over naturally, but that's a rather different dynamic.

<comment><USER14> Not sure if he would have been better off or not. I'm glad he didn't grovel; we shouldn't incentivize mobbing innocent people, especially under overtly false pretenses (though it's entirely unfair that the innocent party has to endure all of the consequences for doing what is right while the mobbers get off scot-free).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think one of the biggest misconceptions that highly educated people have is to think that they are immune to the effects of an angry/unruly mob. As participant or as victim.

<comment><USER16> I think one of the biggest misconceptions that anti-mob people have is that there is no cost to letting people go un-shunned.

There is much hand-wringing over the handful of people wrongly shunned, but many of the wringers give no thought at all to the victims who are forced out of their careers, families, and communities every day because the people around them refuse to consider the possibility that there is a wolf in their midst.

Nieces absent from Thanksgiving while their uncle sits at the table. Talented women leaving tech while their spiteful coworkers are promoted.

Should we allow abusers to hold power because there's a shadow of a doubt that they might be innocent, thereby sending their victims to start over in a new city?

Outside of the court system, shouldn't we try to hit a 1:1 ratio of wrongful excommunications to failures to excommunicate?

Or should it be 1:1,000,000 like the courts do? A million unpunished rapes for every wrongful conviction? A million women pushed out of their rightful career path for everyone one man who was wrongfully fired?

When the information doesn't exist to make perfect decisions, how do we decide who takes up the burden of our mistakes?

<comment><USER15> I'll admit that I'm fairly sketched out in general at the suggestion of extra- legal measures of justice in a civilized society. I think the potential for harm far outweighs the good that might be done and that your goal of a 1:1 ratio sounds a lot like "eye for an eye". It's about as counter to societal progress an idea as I can think up.

And I say all that as someone who saw the Surrogate Court system abused to steal away all of the lifetime wealth honestly earned by my mother.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Jon Ronson's book on this topic, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, is another insightful look at the wild world internet-fueled shaming.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You%27ve_Been_Publicly_Sham...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You%27ve_Been_Publicly_Shamed)

</comment><comment><USER18> I think that the actual issue is the collective desire for punishment, and our inability to forgive others. From what I can see, forgiveness is something that we should strive to achieve as soon as possible after an offense. It's far too easy to hold people in public contempt, or prison, far longer than their just deserts.

<comment><USER19> I think forgiveness assumes that most of these "righteous" crusaders are actually personally angry though, which is rarely the case. It's frequently just virtue signalling in a way that sociopathically ignores that a real human beings' reputation is at stake and the massive consequences of that.

<comment><USER18> I'm sorry, I'm not sure how you could know that, or why it would be a precondition to forgiveness. Assuming that large numbers of people are dishonest and sociopathic may not be incorrect, but acting as if that were true seems pretty misguided.

The problem of forgiveness is forgiving atrocity. Yeshua bar Youssif suggested that one should "turn the other cheek," that is, not just to immediately forgive the offense, but to immediately give the perpetrator the opportunity to commit the same offense again. The application of this precept to persons such as Robert Bowers is a sickening thought -- clearly we must not condone atrocity in the name of forgiveness. Yet we must come in time to forgive, and indeed, sooner than our wont. The matter is a frequent and weighty concern for me; I don't have any answers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." \-- Cardinal Richelieu

<comment><USER21> I'm 44, and either I'm just getting old enough to notice things I never noticed when I was younger, or there's something very concerning brewing - <USER2> seems to me like a small but growing subsegment of western society is working as hard as they can to escalate civilization to an actual violent conflict. And, based on my understanding of history, the biggest losers in that conflict will be the ones pushing the hardest for it right now.

<comment><USER22> I don't think there's a concerted effort to escalate. I think it's more of an emergence phenomenon. But yes, the outcome you describe is likely inevitable if something doesn't change soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'd recommend people having kids give them very common names and consider giving them modifications of the last name if it's rare. It's depressing advice and a bit like paying a lifetime of insurance premiums that's likely never to be needed.

Unless the concept of a search changes in the next couple decades, getting lost in a sea of similar names is the only defense against unfounded accusations. (Changing one's name after the fact doesn't work as you're required to give prior names for many jobs.)

<comment><USER24> When I registered for a library card as a kid, there were five other people with my exact first + last name. The doctor's office my parents used when I was an infant had to modify their policies to ask for my middle initial because there was another infant with the same first + last + birth month.

Definitely recommend it. The first ten pages of Google results for my first + last show like at least 50 other people that aren't me.

Only issue is that it can be difficult to use your name as an email handle - fortunately my parents were tech savvy enough to grab concat(firstName, middleInitial, lastName) as a gmail address and domain name for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> So the author of this piece appears on a panel to defend a book by an author who had published another book called, _Liberal Fascism_ [0]. This piece is supposed to make me feel sorry for her?

Well I don't fully understand the entire context of this person's story but I do know something about being publicly shamed. When I was a kid in high school I had to suffer being called a f __got every day. By every one. I had been hospitalized in an altercation and had been involved in several more. My car had been vandalized on more than one occasion. People would openly point, yell the word, and laugh until the whole crowd had joined in. It was an exercise in torture.

No side eye on the train. No wondering what people were shaming me for. The police couldn't do anything about it.

I used to think public shaming was a bad practice given my poor experience with it. When I heard the first stories of people using social media to shame serial offenders of the social norms of public life I thought... who are these people to judge and decide? What if that person had a _reason_? Do we really want to lower ourselves to this vigilante justice?

However this is 2018. This world has books like, _Liberal Fascism_. It has platforms for people with radical opinions to gain an audience from the comfort of their living room. Instead of limiting the spread of anti-LGBTQ sentiments it has fostered them and allowed them to spread. Instead of reducing racially-charged crimes and hate speech, social media and the Internet has enabled it. On a whole new level.

I think you should count yourself lucky that the people hurt by your conservative views have made you feel ashamed. You felt the discomfort of someone who doesn't fit in. Welcome to the club. How will you change now?

[0] [https://www.amazon.ca/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini- Pol...](https://www.amazon.ca/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini- Politics/dp/0767917189)

<comment><USER14> I agree that public shaming can and does serve a useful function in dissuading fringe right-wing ideologies (among others); however, the whole reason we're seeing an uptick in these fringe ideologies is because public shaming has lost its potency after it was repeatedly abused (mobbing moderate liberals and conservatives for violating far-left moral tenets under the overtly false pretenses of fascism/racism/white-supremacy). Basically

TL;DR, if you (like me) really want to push back against dangerous ideologies like racism, fascism, white-supremacy, etc, then you should oppose groups who try to combat moderate ideas by conflating them with the aforementioned dangerous ideologies.

NOTE: The author of "Liberal Fascism" is a moderate conservative, by the way, and trying to associate him with extreme right-wing views is exactly the problem (and we can acknowledge as much without endorsing his ideas).

<comment><USER25> The difficulty I have with this is that many right-wing conservatives with radical opinions on everything from the rights of LGBTQ folks to race are trying, desperately, to rebrand themselves as moderate conservatives. In the same way that white nationalists are trying to avoid being called out as White Supremacists.

I'm sure Jonah would like me to believe he is a moderate conservative. The history lesson in _Liberal Fascism_ is laughably inaccurate and built on a poorly thought-out premise. It was an argument made that had never existed before. In a word, I don't have any reason to believe he is any kind of moderate person.

I think what we're seeing with public shaming are dis-empowered people calling a spade a spade.

What I'm curious to see is whether people who have felt this kind of shame will change. Will they re-examine their behavior? Or will they, like the Jonah's of the world, dig in and continue to bloviate about leftist-shame- mongering hordes abusing their free speech? And in the process what happens to the rest of us? Will my kids be shamed and called a f-g when they get to school and end up in a hospital with a fractured skull? Will we ever change?

<comment><USER14> Whether or not you or I agree with his book or his beliefs, Jonah Goldberg has a long and distinguished career as a moderate conservative. He's an avid critic of Trump and he vocally condemns racism and white supremacy. Casting him as an extremist is witch-hunting, and it hurts our ability to keep actual racists and white-supremacists in check.

> Will my kids be shamed and called a f-g when they get to school and end up > in a hospital with a fractured skull? Will we ever change?

The world has been changing for decades before this "moderates are actually white-supremacists in disguise" trend kicked off. It's precisely this kind of conflation that jeopardizes the progress we've made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For a more gracious treatment of the subject of public shame, try listening to Monica Lewinsky [0]

"[I was required to] listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth; listen, deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself"

[0] [https://www.ted.com/talks/monica_lewinsky_the_price_of_shame](https://www.ted.com/talks/monica_lewinsky_the_price_of_shame)

</comment><comment><USER27> I have a pretty simple algorithm for articles about the dangers of public shaming. If they fail to catalog GamerGate and the online shaming of Zoe Quinn as an example of the problem, they are probably not a balanced look at the phenomenon. I find Justine Sacco's case is a reasonable metric for the other half of the equation.

<comment><USER28> My understanding of the GG drama was that it started fairly unsavory, but rapidly became about something entirely unrelated to Zoe and her relationships.

The reaction from the gaming media organizations being accused of serious (if video games can be serious) lapses of journalistic integrity, complete with multiple examples of it just poured fuel onto the fire. After that, I stopped following it, but it does seem that more gaming media organizations put effort into disclosing conflicts, so perhaps some good came out of it in the end.

<comment><USER29> I'm afraid I only saw the GG thing _after_ it had stopped being about journalistic integrity and video games (whatever the hell that is). Unsavory is a pretty mild description.

<comment><USER13> Spoiler: there's no "before" and "after". It was _always_ about /v/ trolling Zoe Quinn. And to some people, I suppose, it was about journalistic integrity and video games (to channel '45'). Does one negate the other? That's a hard question, and a matter of interpretation - no matter where you stand, you'll never get everyone on the same page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This article, if written by someone else, might be more impactful for me. This is the story of a woman who fled half-way across the world from a Twitter- storm, but who, when confronted by a refugee who had been shot and tortured in his home country, that his suffering did not mean he had the right to seek asylum. This is a woman who admires Marine Le Pen and Trump, but is happy to seek her own asylum when a minor shit-storm goes down.

But to address the articles concern - the reason we all seek mob justice is because a) it works, and it hurts, and it can ruin the lives of even the richest of us and b) we have no other buttons left. We mash the twitter/facebook/HN button because it is the last place we have any agency. Corporate interests have taken over out politics, rendering even the power of the ballot box moot since most parties appear to be in someone's pockets, the power of our consumption is dulled by decades of moribund growth, our ability to protest curtailed by an ever-present state of surveillance. This is what we have and, by god, we will keep mashing those buttons until things change.

<comment><USER29> I admit I am a little curious about what she thought about living in Australia.

<comment><USER31> I'm sure she found some pleasure and imspiration in the news coming out of Nauru.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A few thoughts just bubbled up while reading this.

1\. Everyone is potentially a journalist. Smartphone & social media = capture & comment.

2\. Everyone is potentially a celebrity. Virality = celebrity.

3\. Everyone is potentially a publisher. Share, post, retweet = publish.

4\. Almost no one is (cares to be) an editor.

It seems to me that though the obvious impact of these is exactly what you'd expect (a permanent social shit-stain), the times they are-a-changing. Belief is no longer a matter of truthiness but almost a lifestyle/fashion choice. People are learning to tune-out whatever it is they consider fake-news. I suspect that the amplified impact of modern "shame storms" will be discounted by the levels of latent disbelief held by people.

i.e. people could (soon) care less.

Maybe?

EDITED: fixed line-break formatting. Why do I keep falling for the same thing?

</comment><comment><USER33> I had the thought the other day that what we're seeing here in the West is like an informal version of China's social credit system, and perhaps that something _like_ China's social credit system is almost unavoidable when everything is hyper-connected like this. This is what humans do, and when you connect them all at scale they do it at scale.

The specific mores and taboos don't matter. People get hung up on this being a "liberal" thing, but go to a very conservative part of the Borg hive mind and you get the same behavior. Criticize Donald Trump on Reddit's conservative forums and you are instantly brigaded, shamed, or banned.

<comment><USER34> The mere existence of the emotion of "shame" shows that this mechanism is old, probably older than Homo sapiens.

It's simply a way to get people to behave in a society, without invoking the heavier tools such as the law.

<comment><USER35> Conversely, that the mechanism is so old indicates that it evolved to work in groups of the size humans (or their ape ancestors even) formed back when it first appeared - i.e. dozens, not millions. It's not a given that the way we scale it is optimal, or even good.

<comment><USER33> That's sort of what bothers me. This stuff evolved to work in small tribes, not global societies. When you don't actually _know_ the person the behavior is very different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's becoming increasingly clear that a fully connected graph is not the ideal form for productive human social organization.

</comment><comment><USER37> One of the funny and snarky things Jordan Peterson has said is that he "figured out a way to monetize social justice warriors".

Which is true in some sense. He's become well funded through donations and book sales even as groups of people direct a ton of hate at him. He can afford to almost totally ignore them, because for every hater there are ten fans.

Which leads to a crazy thought: If the social media mobs knew that they were going to make their victims rich, might they moderate themselves somewhat?

Would they tell each other to "stop talking about X, you're just making them more money!"

I think some kind of meme like this might be a strong antidote in some cases. Maybe some benevolent person or organization could give a $100k patreon seed to each victim of the mob.

Maybe one solution to hateful internet mobs spewing bile is loving internet "mobs" sending donations.

<comment><USER22> I don't think they would stop. I suspect what we're seeing is that the mobs shouting very loudly is being propped up by social media and the news media (who fall all over themselves to report it because of the controversy).

The reality, I think, is that the population of mobs is otherwise quite small, but because of the social media and news media megaphones they appear larger than they are. We're at a point now where everybody else is in fear of being attacked by those mobs so they quietly fund whoever they perceive to be in opposition of the mob. But at the same time, because of the media megaphones, the mobs incorrectly believe they are having success and thus the negative cycle continues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is a great essay on reviling. Revilers are mentionable in the last book of the christian bible.

</comment><comment><USER39> Also known as mob rule, one of the main reasons philosophers like Plato and Aristotle didn't like complete democracies.

</comment><comment><USER40> Buruma deserved to get fired because he had no idea what he was doing or what his magazine's audience was.

</comment><comment><USER41> I don't know if there is a good fix for it, but labels are a very potent weapon. In the U.S. a few decades ago, calling someone a communist sympathizer was a dangerous label. In China in the 1950s being called a rightist was a dangerous label. Today being called a racist, a pedophile, a Nazi, etc. are still dangerous labels. In this article cited the author was labeled a sociopath by an ex-boyfriend and also of being cruel ("cruelty-based view of the world"). These labels are difficult to undo because they are so easy to remember. If you live in a small village and, let's say, get labeled a derogatory term like a "slut" ... that quickly propagates until every villager accepts it as common wisdom that you are. So I do like the discussion about how to engineer a better social system, but it would require censoring label accusations until they had been proven, and this goes up against another part of the social system of supporting free speech. So I think you'd have to ban negative labels in the way that we don't legally allow hate speech (in the U.S.) despite the First Amendment because of the way it causes disproportionate and long-term harm to the victim. I don't see any other realistic solution to a problem that has existed ever since humans formed social groups and speak languages... being ostracized, exiled, or worse has been the outcome of shaming for the last 100k years. I don't see a great way to avoid it other than to just walk on eggshells and always be really nice to everybody or develop the reputation of a maverick... tough but honest and fair (like Sen. John McCain was known for). Regardless, you have to fit yourself into some admirable persona that society values to avoid shaming. If there are other people that get shamed because they don't fit into one of the socially admirable personas, perhaps the best way to address it is to expand the list of socially admirable personas.

</comment><comment><USER42> [https://www.wired.com/story/viral-call-out- culture/amp](https://www.wired.com/story/viral-call-out-culture/amp)

It's not going to stop because it works.

</comment><comment><USER43> An opinion that is politically fueled should not allow this form of "shaming" unless we want to throw free speech out the window. Our small church was "Targeted" because I gave some advice to a gay woman who asked for it about her kids. She then tried to wreck our lives over the asked for advice. You can read the account here: [https://www.scribd.com/document/389212460/Antisemitism-in- We...](https://www.scribd.com/document/389212460/Antisemitism-in-Western- Kentucky)

Others got on the "Band wagon" at different intervals. Whatever the justification is for such behavior, ultimately there is no justification.

</comment><comment><USER44> Don't really think the Kavanaugh example really fits in with the rest. Sorry, if you want to be a Supreme Court justice, yes, you should should be held to a much higher standard. Yelling about "revenge on behalf of the Clintons" does indeed count as "partisan bitterness".

<comment><USER45> If allegation of a decades old crime at an unspecified date, time, and location, and with no corroborating evidence is enough to block a Supreme Court nomination then we're not going to be nominating new justices any time soon (Democrat or Republican).

<comment><USER46> His attitude while defending himself on the stand is the basis for which I would rescind his nomination. His behavior was not befitting of someone who is about to be conferred lifetime appointment to the highest court in the country. I don't want him crafting laws and making decisions that impact huge groups of people.

<comment><USER45> Behavior such as? Most people who I've seen criticize his behavior essentially boil down to criticizing him for not admitting guilt, or because he tried to discredit Ford - neither of which are valid points in my view. Defending oneself from an accusation inherently entails discrediting the accuser, to criticize defendants for doing so is essentially saying it should be socially unacceptable to defend oneself from an accusation. While I probably won't agree with Kavanaugh's court opinions, the opposition to his appointment also has negative effects. It was correlated with a drop in trust for alleged victims of sexual assault, for example: [https://www.economist.com/graphic- detail/2018/10/15/after-a-...](https://www.economist.com/graphic- detail/2018/10/15/after-a-year-of-metoo-american-opinion-has-shifted-against- victims)

<comment><USER47> Behavior such as repeatedly making easily disprovable statements (which numerous past acquaintances who had no particular reason to otherwise make public statements about his nomination called out as blatant lies), and pugnaciously asking a Senator whether she ever gets black-out drunk.

After starting his career in politics as a vicious partisan hack e.g. involved directly in a conspiracy to undermine Judiciary Committee hearings, perjuring himself in his first judicial confirmation hearing, and spending his judicial career on tireless and extreme support for corporate interests, he should have not been the nominee; there are many less controversial and more respected choices among high-profile career members of the GOP. But if he had acted like an adult in the hearing and been willing to admit to being an angry drunken partier as in his teens and twenties who might have done stupid things and not remembered, and demonstrated some contrition and sign of personal growth, I and many others would have some respect for it.

Instead, his behavior was the most hostile and disrespectful I have ever seen in a public hearing. I urge anyone curious about this to watch the 3 hour hearing for yourself. In my view his confirmation is a stain on the Senate and the Court. It cements the public perception that the rich and powerful can do anything they want, remain unapologetic, and face no consequences.

<comment><USER45> He repeatedly stated that did consumed large quantities of alcohol in late high school and in college. Maybe there is diagreement over the exact degree of inebriation, but I am not so sure it's correct to say he lied. Regardless, the two points after are where the problematic nature of the complaints against Kavanaugh surface:

> who sometimes shoved his penis in women's faces,

Another allegation which he denies. As I predicted, the core complaint is that he denies the allegations made against him. This is effectively constructing a situation in which the accused is guilty of something no matter what. Either 1) the accused does not defend themselves and is guilty of the alleged crimes, or 2) the accused does defend themselves, but in the world view you've constructed this makes them guilty of hostility and disrespect.

> and demonstrated some contrition

Contrition for what? He denies said allegations. Again, when you get to the bottom of it this is essentially criticizing the fact that Kavanaugh maintained his innocence. This is what was so pernicious about the Kavanaugh hearings that bothered even me, a lifelong Democrat. The fact that merely trying to defend oneself against an allegations is grounds for negative character judgement is at odds with the core principles of justice.

> and sign of personal growth, I and many others would have some respect for > it.

If going from a binge drinking teenager to Supreme Court nominee (let alone Justice) doesn't demonstrate personl growth I don't know what does. This is greater growth than most people on HN will likely achieve (myself included).

Update: It appears the above poster had since edited their comment. My response took a while to write, so it could be that their edit was made before my response was done. I urge commenters not to assume bad faith on their part.

<comment><USER47> > _He repeatedly stated that did consumed large quantities of alcohol in late > high school and in college._

No, he repeatedly _denied_ it (while only admitting that he "liked and likes beer" and occasionally drank beer in moderation). He also made up comically absurd lies about his high school yearbook, and lied about several other more serious topics e.g. related to his work for Starr and his work as a Bush staffer. (I don't intend to re-litigate this here. You can do a web search and find numerous analyses of the details.)

<comment><USER45> From his testimony:

> I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many > beers.

It may be valid to say that his drinking was more serious than his tone seems to indicate, but to say that he did not admit drinking to excess is factually incorrect.

<comment><USER47> The description from everyone who knew him was that he got shit-faced several times per week, and was commonly a belligerent drunk.

Did you watch the hearing? If not, I strongly recommend it. I don't know anyone who watched it all the way through who thought that Kavanaugh was being candid or sincere in response to Senators' polite questioning.

A nomination hearing is not a trial; you should not be trying to parse his statements as if it were. The standard for a Supreme Court Justice should not be "well if we give him the benefit of the doubt he was grossly misleading, uncooperative, and aggressively disrespectful but a jury might not convict him of perjury".

P.S. What do you think "boof" and "devil's triangle" mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Why is this dated January 2019?

<comment><USER49> The site seems to be for a print magazine so this article is slated to appear in the January 2019 issue.

<comment><USER50> I wonder if this improves or harm the SEO for these articles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The issue is also that people got more and more sensitive over ybrast decades. Political correctness seems to be at a all time high.

Try to say openly in the bay area that you support Trump and you will be shamed like never before.

Shaming is now always in our mind and I find myself thinking more and more about redacting what I say to make it "unshameful" in order to avoid any possibility of shaming.

<comment><USER52> I don't think that's the same thing. It does point to a basic intellectual failing of the modern right, though... conflating being judged with being censored.

Nobody's taking away your right to free speech. We just reserve the right to think you're an asshole for saying it.

<comment><USER51> Well, this is why the country is so divided. Instead of having a debate, the new way of doing is to directly go to the conclusion that "you must be an asshole". Good Proof of openmindness...

Not targeting a specific side btw, this is a trend on the left as well as on the right.

<comment><USER52> Some things aren't worth debating. If someone says that protesters should be shot, they're not worth debating. They're an asshole. If someone says Sky Daddy waved his hand and created the world 5000 years ago, they're not worth debating.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ggplot2 – The code powering all those excellent charts is 10 years old - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1007328/all-hail-ggplot2-the-code-powering-all-those-excellent-charts-is-10-years-old/ <comment><USER2> I've pretty much built my career using ggplot2 charting. Grammar of graphics is a really smart idea. Hadley's a master interface designer and decent human- being to boot! :)

I really can't express how thankful I am for Hadley's work.

</comment><comment><USER3> ggplot2 _is_ the primary reason to use R. Not that Python's modern charting libraries like bokeh/seaborn are bad, but ggplot2 is so robust and customizable while requiring very little LOC. And that doesn't even include external libraries which extended ggplot2, including pairs plots ([https://rdrr.io/cran/GGally/man/ggpairs.html](https://rdrr.io/cran/GGally/man/ggpairs.html)) and _automatic interactive charts_ with plotly ([https://plot.ly/ggplot2/](https://plot.ly/ggplot2/))

ggplot 2.2.0 added a lot of customization features which make it easier to make a plot look more unique than the stereotypical ggplot2 chart, which I plan to cover in a tutorial soon. (here's an older ggplot2 tutorial of mine which still holds up: [http://minimaxir.com/2015/02/ggplot- tutorial/](http://minimaxir.com/2015/02/ggplot-tutorial/) )

<comment><USER4> I think the biggest issue with matplotlib is it's straddling of the fence between MATLAB and pythonic syntax throughout the library. It makes it actually pretty hard to predict what the syntax/call signature of a particular method is if you don't use it fairly regularly.

<comment><USER5> This. Matplotlib is easily the most jarring library I use on anything like a regular basis. I really want a requests-for-charting, which has a more pythonic syntax.

<comment><USER4> seaborn is actually pretty nice, though not as diverse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think I've used a plotting system that even comes close to ggplot2 in terms of intuitiveness. I honestly don't think that R would be held in such high esteem without Wickham's contributions.

<comment><USER7> The original base R plotting system is wonderful in its own right, but for different reasons.

<comment><USER8> And then lattice also, which preceded ggplot2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've gotten a fair amount of 100 percents, and most recently a job, for which a lot of the credit goes to ggplot.

The funniest bit is that the non-technical think it's something extremely complicated when in reality, after somewhat of a learning curve, it's more intuitive than plotting in excel.

<comment><USER10> One of the main reasons I started with R all those years ago is because updating the monthly charts in excel was (manual | time-consuming | boring), but running printing a new batch of ggplots was a piece of cake. I literally arrived for the graphics and stayed for the rest of R.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've always wanted to switch from python's matplotlib to ggplot, but never found sufficient advantages to make the switch. Especially considering that I use python for doing data analysis, and pandas+ipython-notebook can be tightly integrated with matplotlib.

Plus I've found it easier to create compact figures necessary for academic publishing with matplotlib. ggplot's defaults create graphs that take up too much space!

<comment><USER8> Not that this helps with the defaults, but you can use something ggplot2-like in python now:

[https://plotnine.readthedocs.io/en/stable/](https://plotnine.readthedocs.io/en/stable/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> To those of you who hate R, consider investing 1/2 hour to learn the dplyr package. Dplyr is, in my view, Hadley Wickham's real masterpiece and is why I use R for most data analysis nowadays.

As for ggplot, the 'grammar of graphics' approach makes it intuitive to get started with but I often run into trouble with both the inheritance hierarchy and with getting graphics 'the last mile' to presentation-quality.

My favorite ggplot2 graphic? The London Cycle Hires Map:

[http://spatial.ly/2012/02/great-maps- ggplot2/](http://spatial.ly/2012/02/great-maps-ggplot2/)</comment>


America's gender-fluid future, in 100 years of baby name trends - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1237944/americas-gender-fluid-future-in-100-years-of-baby-name-trends/ <comment><USER2> Note that when the article says "...and Scarlett and Victoria at 1.00, without a single boy.", they actually don't know that for sure. The SSA doesn't report on any name given to less than five children (for privacy reasons), so it's possible that there were up to four male Victorias born last year.</comment>


Editor in chief, The Next Web, France shares xkcd without attribution - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/100322256610515857927/posts/fckFqraHPP5

<comment><USER2> It's worse, far worse: he even omitted the title text! ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> So?

Honest question. So, what?

Provided I don't make/imply a claim of authorship—and in this instance he clearly hasn't—I simply don't perceive a duty of attribution when I'm sharing things to friends.

<comment><USER2> The duty still exists, regardless of your _purpose_ or _audience_ , or whether it's _convenient_ for you to say "and btw, this is from XKCD"; however it's rather unlikely that anyone would try to push you to uphold it in those circumstances.

The claim here seems to be "as Editor-In-Chief of a site dealing eminently with the Web, he should know and follow it"; but indeed - trying to stir up a storm in this very tiny teacup sounds forced and sensationalist (there are much more interesting cases, such as The Oatmeal versus that "fun-something" site).

<comment><AUTHOR> We probably won't witness a spectacle like the one with The Oatmeal again in our lifetime! Yes, the title is needlessly sensationalist but it astounds me how we can't even get media professionals to get these things right. Would TNW be very accommodating to people who share their content this way?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So?</comment>


China's plan to organize its society relies on 'big data' to rate everyone - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-plan-to-organize-its-whole-society-around-big-data-a-rating-for-everyone/2016/10/20/1cd0dd9c-9516-11e6-ae9d-0030ac1899cd_story.html <comment><USER2> I feel like a crazy person every time I try to point out that North America is already there. We've just done it in a less reductionist manner, in which multiple scores are used for different purposes, because you can discriminate better with better targeted data.

The IRS rates you on likelihood of fraud, border patrol rates you on your likelihood of breaking residency law, the FBI rates everyone's chances of being a terrorist, credit agencies rate your worthiness of a loan, insurance companies rate your chances of being a cost, banks rate your likelihood of paying a mortgage, your friends rate your worth and you let them, and if you're in the media biz everything comes down to a numbers game. Your income is used to sort you into pidgeonholes in virtually every aspect of your interaction with every social institution.

Your worth as a human is already determined by a set of numbers; we've just done it so much better than China, because nobody noticed.

<comment><USER3> As far as I know, none of the agencies you mentioned have _individual numerical scores_ for 330M+ Americans and US residents. The closest thing is credit scores (which the article mentions), which are metered and tracked by _private companies_ under a broad set of federal regulations.

More to the point, your potential employers don't get access to your personal life, beyond what you divulge to them and whatever information they get from public records (sex offender lists, states with public arrest records, &c). They don't know how "good" of a citizen you are, your mental health record, or if you've ever gotten a speeding ticket. China's proposed system opens all of that.

<comment><USER4> > The closest thing is credit scores (which the article mentions), which are > metered and tracked by _private companies_ under a broad set of federal > regulations.

Is the fact that private companies do the tracking supposed to make me feel better? It doesn't; it only increases the likelihood that the information will be sold to unknown 4th parties or auctioned at bankruptcy fire-sales.

Not even a month has gone by since the story broke of law enforcement buying data off Twitter's firehose from a _private company_ to track protesters. See also: parallel reconstruction.

<comment><USER5> > Is the fact that private companies do the tracking supposed to make me feel > better?

YES!! A government has much more power than a company operating under it, particularly in a single-party state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just finished watching the Nosedive (Season 3, episode 1) from Black Mirror on Netflix, it shows a similar system. Unlike other Black Mirror episodes its quite well balanced. I would highly highly recommend watching it.

<comment><USER7> I watched it last night and was struck by how much impact had been lost by Netflix transition. OK they were clearly going for humour, but even with bigger production, and good acting the longer running time diluted it so much. We didn't need the star rating explained every 2 mins for the first 20.

Though I think it was that one that's based on a Charlie Brooker story, rather than written by.

I actually paused after to decide if I was going to bother with the rest at all. 2nd episode (as far as I've got) was much better.

<comment><USER8> I just finished the third and have liked all three but agree with you completely. The original runs packed far more punch than what I've seen so far.

<comment><USER8> Strike that, the fourth episode is amazing and as good as any made previously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My concern is that China will use the scoring to make moral judgments about citizens. Yes, we have credit scores and DMV scores and some of us wind up on white lists (PreCheck) or black lists (No-Fly) for air travel.

But determining business risk is different from determining whether someone is a moral or immoral person, and then using that subjectivity to control the population. It's value to the regime is in that subjectivity: If you threaten my political aspirations, I'll score you as immoral, report your transgressions on the nightly news and toss you in prison to be reprogrammed.

The US separates church and state to prevent this.

<comment><USER10> The problem with this happening in China is that, given the rampant corruption, authoritarianism, lack and transparency and lack of rule of law in China, the system is pretty much guaranteed to be expressed in the worst possible way: used for population control and political repression, and gamed by those in power for their own benefit.

Something really bad is happening in China. There's been talk for a few years about abolishing the _hukou_ system of housing registration, which would appear to be a step towards liberalization, but at the same time the government seems to be running full tilt in the other direction, developing new systems for control. I just left China after fifteen years, and when I moved out of my apartment in central Beijing, an Indian guy was considering moving in after me. The local police station told my landlord, "no Indians". Later they told her, "no one without a Beijing hukou can live there", which is pretty staggering if true, as the majority of Beijing residents don't have Beijing hukou.

I don't know what's going on, but levels of paranoia in the higher reaches of power are spiking, big time.

<comment><USER11> > The problem with this happening in China is that, given the rampant > corruption, authoritarianism, lack and transparency and lack of rule of law > in China, the system is pretty much guaranteed to be expressed in the worst > possible way: used for population control and political repression, and > gamed by those in power for their own benefit.

Well said. This can be said about pretty much any "system" being introduced in China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is what the DMV does with the point system. The FBI and CIA I think also collect statistics and profile relevant individuals. The difference I guess is that most of these systems are in separate silos. The Chinese government is taking the next logical step and linking it all together. Reminds me of a quote

 _Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should._

<comment><USER13> DMV tracking whether you are driving drunk is not the same as the Chinese govt. tracking whether you praise the govt. on Facebook.

> The FBI and CIA I think also collect statistics and profile relevant > individuals.

Citation needed (especially that they do it for everyone).

<comment><USER14> The US does track what you say on Facebook to see how much of a terrorist or criminal you might be. Just because you think "praise the government" isn't worthy of reward, doesn't mean it isn't. Afterall, China doesn't have a democracy, so if people are too dissatisfied with the government, instead of voting it out, they might have a revolution, which would be disastrous. In that environment, praising the government can be helpful to keep people safe from violence.

<comment><USER13> I agree it makes sense for the Chinese govt. just as it made sense, for example, for a slave trader to put down slaves that didn't toe his line and reward those that obeyed him fully.

You know what might make more sense? The Chinese govt. (or any other similar aspiring govt.) should spend billions on BCI research and implant chips in everyone so that any dis-harmonious thoughts can be culled right at the source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As I understand it, the reason the world have become more democratic and liberal for generations was because freedom made a society work better. The open societies out competed the closed ones.

If this model really works for China and other non democracies, so they can keep a liberal economy and still control people hard politically, then:

1984, here we come. :-(

<comment><USER16> It really does seem like, with so much distraction and so little necessity, we're nearing the end of the democratic stage of the cycle, where people use freedom chaotically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Trackers and social media companies try to build similar scoring systems here.

If banks or insurance companies can figure out how credit score changes of Facebook friends predicts you financial status, better abandon them if they screw things up.

[https://mic.com/articles/123452/facebook-to-let-banks- discri...](https://mic.com/articles/123452/facebook-to-let-banks-discriminate- based-on-friends-credit-score)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Project Cybersyn in 1970's Chile, [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning- machin...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine)

 _" Beer was a leading theorist of cybernetics—a discipline born of midcentury efforts to understand the role of communication in controlling social, biological, and technical systems. Chile's government had a lot to control: Allende, who took office in November of 1970, had swiftly nationalized the country's key industries, and he promised "worker participation" in the planning process. Beer's mission was to deliver a hypermodern information system that would make this possible, and so bring socialism into the computer age._"

<comment><USER18> Cybersyn was about giving the government what we would call a 'dashboard' of the planned economy (with Star Trek chairs), not social control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How incredibly dystopian of you, China. This is also pretty funny considering it is exactly the premise the first episode of the new _Black Mirror_ season.

<comment><USER20> Well, I recall news from at least 1-2 years ago about these Chinese plans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This reminds me of the "Whuffie" social currency from Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel _Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom_. A person's current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain implant giving them an interface with the Net.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie)

<comment><USER22> Which, incidentally, Cory Doctorow considers to be a fundamentally terrible idea: [http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2016/03/cory- doctorow-w...](http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2016/03/cory-doctorow- wealth-inequality-is-even-worse-in-reputation-economies/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Reddit and YC also expose each action to voting and judging, and sum up users into karma scores. We already live in such a rating based moral system. If the reddit karma would decide a person's worth and social rights, that would be pretty dangerous. People would self censor, be less creative, and in general only act in a way that protects the score. It would turn into a kind of self policing.

<comment><USER24> True, but these are privately owned communities and if you disagree with their standards you can go join some other community or start your own. A Chinese citizen can't exactly go start their own competitor to the Communist Party.

<comment><USER25> And yet... credit scores are maintained by private companies, and are inescapable in the US, as are their effects on your opportunities in life.

So "It's a company, not a government" is not a useful argument to make for this kind of situation.

<comment><USER24> The credit rating industry in the US is very heavily regulated. Setting aside whether the regulation of that industry is good or not, there is really only one US credit scoring system and it's effectively controlled by the government, so this is not an example of multiple, privately controlled, competing systems at work.

The Chinese "social score" system would almost certainly be developed and administered by private companies (prototypes and precursors have been). The government would just set the rules. So in fact it would be similar to the US credit system in this way, one system, dictated by the government, private entities just handle its operation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Someone mistook various dystopian science fiction books for howto guides.

</comment><comment><USER27> Well, this is bad because it's the Chinese government.

But companies like Airbnb have to use proxy metrics like number of Facebook friends. If I could be proven to be the trustworthy person I am, then a host wouldn't need to look at all that. If I'm known to have destroyed someone's home, then someone else on Turo knows better than to rent to me.

In practice, it's likely to turn into an eBay style "A++++ best person ever. Let me on the bus brilliantly! 5/5" but the idea isn't terrible on its own.

<comment><USER28> >Well, this is bad because it's the Chinese government.

Follow up question: would this be good because it was by the US government?

<comment><USER29> No! Too much power and information in one place is always bad

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is clearly a very bad direction for China in itself. Most people reading this instinctively want a "but", and this is one that I can provide that applies to China and Russia (though Russia is really much freer than China):

Western critiques of China and Russia are directed at the regime, but if the regime collapses, there is no on to criticize, but people still suffer. That is, the Western critique is not fully utilitarian: it criticizes the regime for taking measures to ensure stability, without considering the consequences of the regime losing control.

For reference, about 70 million Chinese died after the collapse of the Qing dynasty (caused in part by Western intervention, by the Opium wars), and Russian life expectancy reduced significantly during the power vacuum between the fall of communism and the rise of Putin.

This gives some background on why both countries support their governments: they want stability and strong central government because they know the alternative.

If Westerners want to adopt a moral and convincing approach to human rights in China and Russia, they need to explain how these things can exist without causing a collapse of law and order that would be worse for the ordinary citizen. This would require reigning in the CIA so that countries could loosen the reigns without fear of a color revolution or Arab spring.

<comment><USER31> With Trump and Hillary, the community on Chinese websites are increasingly disenchanted with democracy. One high-vote answer in Zhihu, or "the Chinese Quora", claims that this election cycle has been a "great educational experience for Chinese Nationalism and Marxism". You'd be surprised how popular Trump is in China, and how much they support their Government.

<comment><USER32> If Chinese love Trump, why are they disenchanted with democracy? Trump is doing great in democracy, in the #1 or #2 spot. And I'd assume they'd like Trump less if they were more knowledgeable of English and USA news.

<comment> li-ch By democracy, I think he meant hillary's brand of "democracy", which is going to win in November.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Imagine a world where an X government monitors everything you do, amasses huge amounts of data on almost every interaction you make, and awards you a single score that measures how "trustworthy" you are."

What country is he talking about?

</comment><comment><USER34> This is wonderful. A fully gamified life. It is so dystopian...

America has the credit rating system. With much hand wringing and energy devoted to increasing or altering the score and so on (companies advertising a way to increase it for you, landlords claiming they'll ruin your credit rating if you ask for a deposit refund ...).

Now imagine if the system was even more corrupt and you could pay someone under the table to alter your score directly. Now imagine that is not just a number for your credit worthiness, but a number for your, well general-life- worthiness. There is no way that is not getting exploited, hacked into or gamed. Maybe that is the ultimate goal, it lets those who control this system, control the population?

Imagine an implied threat of getting -150 points for joining a protest. Or maybe your relative is going to court, you imply to the judge he might get a +50 if he lets your nephew walk. Possibilities are endless, as they say.

<comment><USER12> Isn't this the case already? The judge will let your nephew walk if you are rich enough. You don't need to be in China for that to be the case. What is wealth if not another point system?

<comment><USER34> It is just much more efficient if you can just twiddle a number in a database instead of say having to gift them a house. Or instead of capturing and torturing someone, just lower their "karma" so they can never get a job first. It is about efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> We already do this. Everyone has a credit score. Everyone gets a background check before renting or getting a job. Let's not pretend we don't have a rating for everyone yet...

</comment><comment><USER36> I think the moral highground to judge surveillance and human rights issues has been lost. Pre snowden this kind of thing would cause mass hysteria, massive moral grandstanding and call for sanctions in western populations and media.

Now chastened its more of legalese and tiny triumps based on hope rather than scrutiny.

Just as well the sordid culture of using human rights to score moral points and signal cultural superiority is done and the remaining vestiges of apologism and denial should think seriously about self examination and scrutiny lest the ground shifts even further under their feet.

</comment><comment><USER10> Coincidently, an article[1] just came down my WeChat pipeline about the population clean-up of Beijing. It's a great, classic propaganda article, full of pictures and statistics about how crowded Beijing is, and lots of "wouldn't it be nice if there were fewer people?" and "look how hard your government has had to work, don't you feel sorry for us?".

Basically they're driving out those who don't have Beijing housing registration. The propaganda is addressed to those who will enjoy the relief after the undesirables are gone. No one speaks to the undesirables.

The one-child policy may be over, but the Chinese government's manipulation of the lives of its citizens is alive and well.

[1]: [https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA3Mzc3MTc0Mg==&mid=265293...](https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA3Mzc3MTc0Mg==&mid=2652931543&idx=1&sn=9f41b93d5f96260e1b76622bc24ff239&)

Edit: Here's another link (sorry, also in Chinese) from June, laying out the bones of the policy to drive people out of the capital. Again, posed as a great policy with no downsides. [http://www.china.com.cn/guoqing/2016-06/17/content_38687237....](http://www.china.com.cn/guoqing/2016-06/17/content_38687237.htm)

</comment><comment><USER37> Relevant extra credits episode: [https://youtu.be/lHcTKWiZ8sI](https://youtu.be/lHcTKWiZ8sI)

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm halfway through "Weapons of Math Destruction", and this sort of thing is really, really scary. If the amount of damage done in the US already with big data models, with a much narrower focus, for smaller consequences, and ostensibly "good" purposes is any indication, this will be incredibly harmful.

</comment><comment><USER39> I feel sad about the Chinese people and people living under communist/Marxist regimes.

Communism/Marxism is one of the worst ideologies out there (along with intolerant religions). The western democracy is the best model the humans have invented yet. This is not to say we must not strive to improve it. But Communism/Marxism is not at all an improvement, it's an outright societal cancer. But I am seeing is the increase in criticism of US (and western democracies) by leftists and liberals. That in itself would not have been a big deal but these leftists praise Communism/Marxism.

This is a wake-up call to the people of united states who are listening too much to the unjust and undue criticism of the US govt for surveillance. Post- Snowden some leftists are taking undue advantage of the atmosphere to spread their fear mongering anti-democracy propaganda amongst US citizens.

<comment><USER40> You are total wrong. In fact,today China is not communist/Marxist at all.China is more Capitalism than USA. The word communist/Marxist is only mentioned when holding big meetings.

<comment><USER39> >>China is more Capitalism than USA.

China is not at all capitalist as there is no free market, and you may say it's not communist/marxist if it pleases you but it's a communist party controlled tyranny. *

If anything, China is much, much more tyrannical and dictatorial than USA. Tyranny and brutal dictatorships is only what communism/Marxism have produced in large amounts. The communism/Marxism have produced very little good and very large evil wherever they got foothold.

* A Chinese citizen cannot even move within China without getting permits from the communist politburo approved officials, forget about him/her being able to launch a business freely.

Edit: added * details

<comment><USER11> Communism/Marxism =/= tyranny and brutal dictatorships. They aren't mutually exclusive, but one doesn't imply the other. There was Marxism and tyranny in the Soviet Union, modern China only has tyranny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is kind of interesting, in a "history of communism" type of way.

There's been a sense that communism as a goal in China has been in zombie mode for a while with the system continuing temporarily until an economic crisis or somesuch brings it to an end.

This reminds me of the various "rationalisation" initiatives undertaken by state communism(s) in their early days which formed such a big part of what we think of as communism. These were (attempts at) nitty-gritty policies aimed at achieving the goals of big talking communist slogans and utopianism.

It seems revivalist.

In some ways, this ideas kind of makes "sense'. Digitisation, social media and other features of modern societies lend better (at least in theory, while wearing our 99 year old state-communism hats) to this sort of societal engineering than their 20th century equivalents.

<comment><USER42> Zombie mode communism has been already tried right in the beginning by New Economic Policy in Soviet Union between 1922 and 1928 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy)

The end was one of the bloodiest crimes against humanity and one of the most widespread genocides of the previous century.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> "Imagine a world where an authoritarian government monitors everything you do, amasses huge amounts of data on almost every interaction you make, and awards you a single score that measures how "trustworthy" you are."

Oh, like the US.

</comment><comment><USER44> I despise this aspect of our field. On the one hand we're ushering in a new era of learning and knowledge. On the other we're creating tools of unprecedented power.

They're searching for enemies of their state and they will probably find them. Let's not ignore the fact that heroes and patriot's often start out as an "enemy".

Sarah Winchester believed she was haunted by the men, women, and children killed by her husband's invention. What will keep us up at night in the future?

</comment><comment><USER45> The North Koreans already do this, and they did it with bureaucrats, not "big data" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbun)

[http://www.hrnk.org/uploads/pdfs/HRNK_Songbun_Web.pdf](http://www.hrnk.org/uploads/pdfs/HRNK_Songbun_Web.pdf) (PDF with more details)

</comment><comment><USER46> I've seen reports of this for at least 6mo to 1yr. Is this vaporware by China or do they have anything more than a press release at this point?

<comment><USER47> This is something beyond the sesame credit score talked about before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> It is already in place. If you owe someone some money and you don't want to pay. He can sue you in court, and what the court does is that before you pay back whatever you owe, you cannot buy flight tickets, cannot take high-speech train, cannot stay in good hotels (basically any where you need to show your ID). agencies cannot book you holidays abroad and so on.

<comment><USER49> > cannot take high-speech train

This is one of the best Freudian slips / unintended puns that I have ever read. Damn right he's not taking the high-speech train anywhere in China by standing on a soapbox and complaining about Big Brother and disrupting the harmony of society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Playing devil's advocate here. Is the outrage towards this kind of system essentially a criticism of the technology? Specifically, can we guarantee that the system would be secure and can we guarantee that the system is accurate (objective) and not subject to human manipulation?

If we hypothetically assume that the system is hacker-proof enough and accurate enough for all practical purposes, is there still an underlying moral reason not to implement this system? I instinctively feel that it is wrong, but I just don't know what it is.

I think we all unconsciously rate people in our social interactions. Maybe to explicitly quantitate that rating solidifies it and makes social mobility harder? Our fuziness in our unconscious rating of people gives leeway for others chances to redeem themselves or not? Whereas in a system like this, people are more likely to be stuck where they are?

</comment><comment><USER51> Propaganda Games: Sesame Credit

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI)

</comment><comment><USER52> All western reporting about Sesame Credit has focused on privacy. Has there been any objective analysis on projected economic impact of the system?

</comment><comment><USER53> Black Mirror S03E01 minus the government. That show is incredible.

</comment><comment><USER54> Next up: Attach the score to "basic income".

</comment><comment><USER54> Next up: Attach it to "basic income".

</comment><comment><USER55> We have Facebook for us to do this.

</comment><comment><USER56> Black Mirror - Season 3

</comment><comment><USER57> Lets all pretend that the US won't be doing this in 10 years.

Facebook/Google are already working with credit agencies and law enforcement.

We make China out to be the big bad guy, but all they do is follow our example.

<comment><USER32> Credit agencies?</comment></comment>


Huge collection of entrepreneurship videos from Stanford - <AUTHOR> http://edcorner.stanford.edu/materialSearch.html?materialType=9&top=20&title=Top+20+Videos Video lectures on entrepreneurship from Larry Page, John Doerr, Guy Kawasaki, Vinod Khosla, Mark Zuckerberg and hundreds of other speakers, from the Stanford Technology Ventures program.

<comment><USER2> Cornell has a similar collection here:

<http://eclips.cornell.edu/entrepreneurs.do>

The collection was started largely to highlight the ways men & women differ in their thinking about business. Because of this it probably isn't as useful as the Stanford collection if you're just looking for famous people giving business advice.

edit: The interviews with Tony Dellamano and Mark Kuperman about their food startup are actually pretty good.

[http://eclips.cornell.edu/entrepreneur.do;jsessionid=41794AC...](http://eclips.cornell.edu/entrepreneur.do;jsessionid=41794ACD6B8B75C48029F74B23D03A66?id=249)

[http://eclips.cornell.edu/entrepreneur.do;jsessionid=41794AC...](http://eclips.cornell.edu/entrepreneur.do;jsessionid=41794ACD6B8B75C48029F74B23D03A66?id=250)

<comment><USER3> eClips shows more than just the difference between men and women in business. The site has over 12,000 videos and podcasts, relating to entrepreneurship, business and leadership. The clips are sorted into more than 450 topics and themes.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin + Groupon = BitcoinAction.com - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoinaction.com/

<comment><USER2> Has the Bitcoin fad finally passed? This has been here for 11 hours with only 2 points and no discussion.</comment>


Program development is state change of a Key-Value database - <AUTHOR> http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768.html <comment><AUTHOR> This seems like an exaggeration, but look who is saying it: Joe Armstrong.

<comment><USER2> It seems like a useful abstraction over the Von Neumann architecture. I mean a memory address is just a key to some value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't tell if he realizes that he basically described a rather typical OOP language and runtime?

<comment><AUTHOR> That would only be true if you put all of your functions in a single Class. He is attacking the idea of Object Oriented Programming. He is saying that even modules are too constricting. He wants to get rid of everything above the level of a function, and just have functions, all existing in the same namespace.

<comment><USER3> I mean... they technically are. Namespaces are just logical. Think of Elixir namespaces. They're implemented as weird Erlang module names via irregular atom-literals. Or languages like Objective-C which traditionally had no namespaces, and thus resulted in conventional patterns like everything in the original NextStep frameworks being prefixed with `NS`.

But even looking straight at Erlang modules... there's not a tremendous amount of difference between writing or calling `lists:map(Function, List).` and `lists_map(Function, List)`, and if you want to leverage something like generics/traits/protocols, then you'd just have `map(Function, Datatype)` and dispatch the right version of `map/2` by inspecting `Datatype` to allow you to do away entirely with namespacing of any kind.

The only other distinction that would be provided here with no modules is the lack of ability to have "private" functions. Unless that would be implemented with the "metadata" he talks about... in which case... how's that different than having to explicitly "export" a function to make it be "public"?

I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt here, but I'm not seeing what the insight is supposedly highlighted by Joe here?</comment></comment></comment>


Meet Romo - <AUTHOR> http://romotive.com

<comment><USER2> I keep thinking its going to fall off a table and shatter the screen.</comment>


Fast and easy installation of Docker VM on OS X - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/noplay/docker-osx

<comment><USER2> linkbait.. not OS X.. in a VM

</comment><comment><USER3> Does it support host folder sharing?

PS - I think the boot2docker folks are looking into this as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, just added folder sharing:

[https://github.com/noplay/docker- osx/commit/a7470f9f583cfdad...](https://github.com/noplay/docker- osx/commit/a7470f9f583cfdad6327f792b9d2da4415facdaf)

We're interested in using boot2docker for docker-osx too. Ubuntu is unnecessarily heavyweight for just running Docker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You may want to try: [https://github.com/websecurify/node- vxdocker](https://github.com/websecurify/node-vxdocker)

</comment><comment><USER5> is there any way to make docker vm stop/start persistently like a normal virtualization (virtualbox, vmware)? last i checked the only way to do that was to run a command that never ends, which i thought was pretty inelegant. this tad annoyance is making me stay away from docker, until they improve this area a bit.

<comment><USER6> EDIT: You can run /sbin/init as the command for the Docker instance. This will start a container that doesn't die.

It's "inelegant" in that it's still a command that never ends. But that's how all Unix systems work anyway :)</comment></comment>


Google Maps is now rendered in 3D - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/City+of+London,+email@example.com,-0.0416171,1485a,20y,270h,41.28t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x487603554edf855f:0xa1185c8d19184c0!8m2!3d51.5123443!4d-0.0909852 <comment><AUTHOR> The URL is just a fairly random example.

<comment><USER2> Context? This has been true for years...</comment></comment>


Exxon Mobil replaced by a software stock after 92 years in the Dow - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/25/exxon-mobil-replaced-by-a-software-stock-after-92-years-in-the-dow-is-a-sign-of-the-times.html <comment><USER2> Key points, ripped straight from the website;

* Exxon Mobil's been in the Dow in some form since 1928, but its tenure as the longest-serving component is coming to an end.

* On Monday, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced the largest changes to the 30-stock benchmark in seven years.

* Exxon will be replaced by Salesforce. Amgen and Honeywell International are replacing Pfizer and Raytheon Technologies.

</comment><comment><USER3> A sign of the times... ( _^_^_ )</comment>


Is America's age of discovery over? - <AUTHOR> http://life.salon.com/2011/10/08/is_americas_age_of_discovery_over/singleton/ <comment><USER2> The short answer is no, and even the article says so:

"The Media Lab is, in many ways, the antithesis of a corporate R&D lab. It focuses on human needs, but has no blinders—no time constraints or deadlines, no shareholders to please. It celebrates openness and collaboration between different disciplines and entities. But it winnows ideas quickly because of the emphasis on testing concepts through prototype building. The discoveries that work find their way into the world, with E Ink as exhibit A.

"And then there is SRI. Founded in 1946 in Menlo Park, California, as the Stanford Research Institute, it is now the largest nongovernmental lab in the United States, with roughly $500 million in government-and corporate-funded projects. Like the Media Lab, SRI stretches the R&D horizon far beyond the typical corporate three-to-five-year view. But SRI shows that a research lab armed with a system for commercialization of ideas can successfully cross the so-called valley of death that separates the lab from the marketplace—a route littered with unread papers and long-forgotten patents describing products that never connected with customers."</comment>


A Physicist Explains Why Parallel Universes May Exist - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2011/01/24/132932268/a-physicist-explains-why-parallel-universes-may-exist&sc=fb&cc=fp

<comment><USER2> The infinite universe needs not repeat itself.

Some infinities are bigger than others.</comment>


NoT: Taking the 'Internet' Out of IoT - <AUTHOR> https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/not-taking-the-internet-out-of-iot/ <comment><USER2> I think this is approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

My issue with IoT stuff isn't that it's on my WiFi network. That's great, that means I can interact with it easily.

My issue is that it's communicating with (and often, ultimately, controlled by) a mothership that is somewhere out there on the internet, that I'm not in control of and can't interact with easily.

Having the devices communicating with the mothership using mobile data just takes even more control away from the device owner, which is a step backwards IMO.

The way to make these things secure is to have them on the WiFi network but _not_ speaking to the outside internet, except where explicitly enabled by the owner.

<comment><USER3> What do you think the answer is? Building truly serverless protocols that are content to just live on the WiFi network? That seems like it would require lots of broadcasts on the network which could get congested quickly.

Maybe some kind of standard local server you could run with an easy module API for adding new kinds of devices? Is that what things like Samsung's smart things hub already does?

<comment><USER4> Why would my phone sending commands directly to my lightbulb on the WLAN take up more bandwidth than sending a HTTP request up to the mothership and the lightbulb subscribing to a MQTT channel?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title is horribly wrong; this is not "Taking the Internet out", it's further entrenching it in the devices.

Like the other posters here, I'd like to see local-only devices that _don't_ connect to the Internet.

It's pretty hard to do this securely and easily, though: \- We can't reliably get proper HTTPS certs for local devices (think e.g. a router admin page) \- We can't reliably discover local services (I know about bonjour / mDNS, but it's flaky at best)

I think we as a community need to step up and provide a compelling open-source solution; the industry will follow. Look at what happened with 3D printers: Open-source moved first and established interoperable, open standards (g-code, STL files, filaments) and the industry had no choice but to follow, otherwise they'd be considered inferior. We need to do something similar with IoT.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the concept and it would solve the stated problems, however it's not those problems that are holding me back from IoT. I do not want any IoT/home control device in my house communicating with anything in the cloud, period. Device makers have proven over and over again they cannot make secure devices, and I don't want anyone collecting data on my usage. What is needed is something that can talk to a local server and doesn't need the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER7> Disclaimer: I work for an IoT company and our big solution to this and many others is LoRaWAN. Essentially super cheap low power data transmission network that is in the process of being rolled out as an infrastructure component. Companies like Comcast have made large pledges to provide huge, cheap nationwide coverage in the coming years. The cost of doing that is the LoRaWAN protocol is very low bandwidth but thats pretty good for IoT when most of the time you just need to transfer state.

Also I think LoRaWan networks wouldn't have to necessarily rely on the internet which is the original intent of the article. I think it could be possible to be much more localized like in your house, but right now its early stages and all of the tech i've seen is meant to provide much larger networks.

[https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/wiki/LoRaWAN/Home](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/wiki/LoRaWAN/Home)

</comment><comment><USER8> Good idea, but it'd need way lower prices for mobile data to be economically viable.

</comment><comment><USER9> Tesla & smart energy meters. Don't they both do this?</comment>


Start-ups aiming to cause destruction, not 'disruption' - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9382053/Start-ups-aiming-to-cause-destruction-not-disruption.html

<comment><USER2> All-out destruction comes across as a negative connotation.</comment>


The "world's most wanted hacker," Kevin Mitnick, has gone straight  - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/21/interview-with-the-former-worlds-most-wanted-hacker-kevin-mitnick/ <comment><USER2> I wonder what ever happened to Bill Landreth.</comment>


Asia's richest man building Hong Kong apartments barely bigger than prison cell - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/238416/asias-richest-man-is-building-hong-kong-apartments-barely-bigger-than-a-prison-cell/

<comment><USER2> We could use some of this in San Francisco. A lot of young 20-somethings wouldn't mind just having a bed to crash on that has some privacy that costs far less. Too bad the city mandates a minimum size for apartments that are built and limit the number of folks in a unit.

</comment><comment><USER3> A title comparing these apartments to prison cells and a picture of an apartment half the size. Seems like this article is trying pretty hard to make dense living look bad.

<comment><USER4> Agreed -- it shows a materialist/consumerism bias.

There are many environmental and psychic benefits to requiring/desiring fewer possessions.

If we want to sustain a growing population, we're going to have to confront the bias the title of this article shows.

<comment><USER5> _If we want to sustain a growing population, we 're going to have to confront the bias the title of this article shows._

Or alternatively, we could just build decent places to live in the vast amounts of empty space owned by a handful of rich people who inherited it (UK bias here; don't know how the upper class landowners got the land in other countries).

<comment><USER3> At least in America, land out in the middle of nowhere is extremely cheap. The problem is that people don't want to live there.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


89% of adult men are stronger than the 89% of adult women - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4vcxd0/almost_all_men_are_stronger_than_almost_all_women/ <comment><USER2> And ~30% of women probably run faster than I can. I also know a frog that can hop higher than me. There was once this dude I tried to out bench- press...didn't work out. You know what....who cares.</comment>


Wolfram Alpha API v2: Radically new pricing including free "experimental" access - <AUTHOR> http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/

<comment><USER2> They don't seem to provide any pricing information beyond the free, non- commercial level. This seems unfortunate, and signals to me that if I'm not making a "major" product, I probably wouldn't be able to afford it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was able to receive an upgrade for

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/papfpipabpficccg...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/papfpipabpficccgpbkahpaldkfhhgnk)

That included upgraded API thresholds and all, and I wouldn't consider the Chrome extension to be a "major product"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Glad to see they learned from their previous pricing, <http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/pricing.html>, where the _cheapest_ tier was 1000 requests for $60. Dunno why it took them so long given the angry backlash to their original API, [http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/10/15/the- wolframalpha-api...](http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/10/15/the-wolframalpha- api-has-arrived/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I just signed up for the free API. It took a few minutes getting the Ruby client library working but it seems pretty cool. The 2000 free API calls per month is not as generous as, for example, the Open Calais web service's 50K free calls per day. That said I really appreciate the free use to kick the tires.</comment>


Ruby 2.7 – Numbered Parameters - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@baweaver/ruby-2-7-numbered-parameters-3f5c06a55fe4 <comment><USER2> Just installed ruby-head (ruby 2.7.0dev (2019-03-18 trunk 67296)) and it works very well!</comment>


Is AT&T a Monopoly in the Making? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2011/03/an-ex-regulators-take-on-at-t-buying-t-mobile/72761/

<comment><USER2> You've got to remember that "at&t" (the current one) is _not_ AT&T, the remains of The Bell System resulting from the 1983 divestiture.

SBC, which started out as a Regional Bell Operating Company named "Southwestern Bell", bought the old AT&T at firesale prices back in 2005 and assumed its corporate livery.

SBC and Southwestern Bell before it, never made a secret of thinking that the 1983 Bell System breakup was a mistake, and has spent the last 28 years trying to put the Bell System monopoly back into place.

So, yes, AT&T is a monopoly in the making.

<comment><USER3> Wait...but it _is_ the AT&T from the Bell System. The fact that it was one of the spin-offs buying back the mothership probably has little consequence in terms of attitudes and/or business strategy. I imagine the AT&T ethos of old was pretty well spread between all the "Baby" bells and "Mama" Bell.

Also, you forgot the part where shortly after SBC bought AT&T, the "new" AT&T bought Cingular, a partnership between Bell South and the former AT&T. Oh, and the part where before buying AT&T, SBC also bought Ameritech, the parent company of the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin "Baby" Bells, and Pacific Telesis, the parent company of Pacbell and Nevada Bell.

...and what of the other "Baby" Bells? Well, Bell Atlantic and NYNEX combined to form a company you may have heard of: Verizon!

(source...and a fun read: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Company...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Company#.22Baby_Bells.22))

<comment><USER4> AT&T (formerly SBC) bought BellSouth to gain complete control over Cingular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 _Expect AT &T to make major public commitments to increasing the number of American jobs through this transaction._

The spin on this will be fascinating to see if it plays out as the a lot of jobs are expected to be eliminated as part of a merger.

<comment><USER5> The chocolate ration has been increased to 25 grammes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My proudest accomplishment in law school was a research paper I wrote entitled "Anti-Antitrust: The Need for Antitrust Law Reform."

In that paper, I argued that antitrust law as applied today totally misses the point: the issue shouldn't be whether a company, otherwise satisfying the elements of a monopoly, is harming competitors, but whether a company is _actually harming_ consumers. Put another way: who is complaining about the alleged anticompetitive tactics: competitors, or consumers?

If one studies all the big antitrust cases of the 20th century -- from Alcoa, to DuPont, to Microsoft -- a curious trend emerges: it was always those companies' competitors who took issue with seemingly anticompetitive tactics of the big evil "trusts," and rarely -- if ever -- was it the consumers themselves.

A great example of this is Microsoft in the 1990s: do any of you -- aside from our realm of early adopter computer savvy tech types -- genuinely remember any everyday computer users actually complaining that Windows came preinstalled with IE instead of Netscape? Were consumers actually harmed, were they actually suffering? No: the only "people" who had an issue with MS bundling IE with Windows -- frankly, a brilliant strategy -- were Microsoft's competitors, and not, in fact, MS's customers.

So my take on this ATT & T-mobile merger is simple: the investigation should not focus on whether ATT/T-mobile is a monopoly from competitors' points of view, but whether it is anticompetitive to the point of _actually harming_ consumers, e.g., with higher prices, etc.

Frankly, a good example of a company that really deserves a DOJ investigation is Apple -- IFF customers start to actually complain, and _not_ not just Apple's competitors' start to complain.

Put more simply: a DOJ investigation into whether a company is a monopoly should be based upon whether consumers -- not competitors -- are actually being harmed by the allegedly anticompetitive tactics of a "monopoly."

After all, a company could not become a monopoly without customers' support in the first place. So clearly they have done something right that customers appreciate.

A "monopoly" that is not causing harm to consumers, either directly or indirectly, is not necessarily so terrible a thing. In fact, as with Apple, it is often the case that consumers enjoy a net benefit from such a company.

<comment><USER7> Well in this case I have a grudge against AT&T, specifically as a consumer. I don't like that they can get away absurd customer relations, and I think we need to check them. If Sprint goes away one day I'm not sure what I'll do.

EDIT: You know what I'll do? I'll say screw the paradigm, and start looking into VOIP, and other alternatives, and encouraging everybody else to do it so economies of scale work out.

<comment><USER6> Great, and that's precisely what _should_ happen: the consumers should make their complaints heard ... _not_ competitors who are (usually) just complaining about having not made such a good business decision themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The headline should probably read: 'AT&T Remaking a Monopoly.'

<comment><USER9> The Once and Future Monopoly

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Being a monopoly is the only way AT&T knows how to survive. Do you see them competing ever in a non-regulated field? Even the iPhone deal was a monopoly for 5 years....that's AT&T's DNA.

<comment><USER11> Do you really think it's a regulation issue? This is essentially the corporatist end game dream scenario. What major corporation would ever willingly sacrifice growth, market share & profit for the sustainability of a fair market & the wellbeing of the consumer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not an AT&T thing... all big guys would want it, especially the market share. I am not liking the news of AT&T buying T-Mobile. There so many things f __ _ed up about it. AT &T data usage is not "truly" unlimited. AT&T's customer service sucks big time. When I missed to read the detail of my bill one month, the support rep told me I need to grow up and pay attention to my bill every month. True, I accept it but that also means AT&T cannot be trusted to accurately report on our billing, auto withdrawal, etc. They are bunch of a_*holes. They do this to us while we have other carriers and other options. Imagine how they would treat us if they were the only guys.

</comment><comment><USER13> No. It's a duopoly in the making.

Sprint & Verizon are going to have to hook up next.

<comment><USER14> Who's the other GSM carrier? I'd like to take my bought-and-paid-for Nexus One and switch to them.

<comment><USER15> at&t _is_ the other GSM carrier. If your lucky you might live in a place where you can get another regional carrier (U.S. Cellular, Virgin, etc) but odds are you'll still be stuck using at&t towers.

<comment><USER14> I'm aware of that, which is why I'm asking why it would be a duopoly. at&t will have a monopoly on GSM celluar service, and I'm left without options.

They're saying that all T-Mobile 3G devices would need to be replaced as well ( <http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9M3LNPO0> ) which means that my Nexus One is a $550 paperweight, since it won't be useful on any US carrier. I won't even be able to resell it to recoup some of the cost.

<comment><USER15> O. Ok sorry about that. The duopoly comment is referring to the US cell phone market as a whole. Andrew was saying that because of the merger he believes Sprint and Verizon will be forced to merge, leaving only Verizon and at&t.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One since for sure is that now there is one less choice for the consumer. Not good.

</comment><comment><USER17> You can only believe AT&T is a monopoly if you believe the future of voice and data is through cell towers. My guess is, it's probably not.

<comment><USER18> Left to an open market, it won't be, but if AT&T has its way, it will be. They will buy up or buy control over everything if they can.

Wireless data is not something you want locked up by one company.

<comment><USER19> Definitely - competition played a huge role in making text message plans cheaper. With 1 less network that's available for consumers to choose from kills other chances of networks introducing agressive pricing, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My answer:

No. We still have Verizon and Sprint. We may get a duopoly in 5-10 years, but for now, AT&T is not a monopoly.

<comment><USER21> > We still have Verizon and Sprint.

Not if you're on GSM. Not everyone wants to consider investing in SIM-less devices that only work in the US.

<comment><USER22> Both Verizon and AT&T are using LTE for 4G, though, so Sprint will become the odd one out in that situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So T&AT&T

</comment><comment><USER24> Here we go again…

</comment><comment><USER25> The FTC is going to allow this - yet they spend time and money on Google and AdMob?

<comment><USER26> Thats one of the advantages you get when you wiretap the country.

<comment><USER27> I have a feeling your comment will get dismissed as irrelevant snark, but I have a sinking feeling it's much more accurate than anyone would like to admit. AT&T is pretty well in bed with the government, which gives it political cachet that Google can't dream of getting without wrecking its credibility.

<comment><USER26> Fully agree with you, this whole NSA wiretap business isn't some low level tech grunt and a low level bureaucrat. If someone at the FCC/FTC gets a call from whoever authorized wiretapping the nation they'll listen. And if they start screwing around with the merger they'll get a call from exactly that person.

If Eisenhower was scared of this cabal the FCC/FTC will fold like a house of cards.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."</comment></comment></comment></comment>